Which Image Editing Software is Right for You

If you’re an aspiring professional photographer, it’s worth becoming familiar with the image editing platforms currently available on the market today. Whether or not you’ll actually wind up using one of them depends on your creative vision and compositional style, but in any case, it’s important to gain the knowledge before you plan accordingly. Post production is often an important part of every professional photographer’s workflow. Here’s a brief synopsis of a handful of tools you might consider incorporating in your own:

The Best Photoshop Software1. AdobeAdobe is probably the most popular image editing platform in existence today. It’s such a common platform that we’ve literally starting referring to the image-editing process by Adobe’s branded term “Photoshopping.” There are many reasons why Adobe is a trusted platform to work with. For one, if you’re an NYIP Photoshop Course student, it’s the software we work with throughout the curriculum. Adobe Certified Experts actually guide you step by step through Adobe Photoshop as you work your way through each unit of the course. The reason we chose this platform, and the reason why it’s the one we most highly recommend, is that it’s sort of become an industry standard- so editors and clients for jobs of yours down the road very well may expect you to know how to use it.

Beyond that, Adobe is jam-packed with extremely helpful features that can help you crop, adjust lighting, and any number of common tasks performed in the post production process. (Check out NYIP’s student discount portal to get a major discount on your Adobe purchase.)

2. Corel Paintshop ProAlthough it’s by far the most popular, Adobe isn’t the only effective image editing software in circulation, and there are a handful of others we also give the stamp of approval. The Corel Paintshop Pro brand, for example, offers a wide variety of wonderful post-production products for photographers and is definitely considered among the best in the industry. However, many would argue that even though the full version of Corel Paint Pro is almost equally expensive as the full Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop has better functionality and delivers better results.

3. Free ProvidersIf you’re still simply dabbling in image editing and not quite ready to pull the trigger and invest in a legitimate, paid software, there are also some free options you can play with. GIMP, for example, (which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program) is widely considered one of the best free platforms available. Although it’s rumored to be much less user-friendly than Adobe or Corel, you can still accomplish many of the same things with it- it’ll just take more time.